Overview
Assassin’s Creed made its debut in 2007. With five main titles in the series so far, the series has made its way to the PSVita for the first time with Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation. With all the hype and praise this game has received since it was first announced at E3, with many claiming it to be “the Vita’s Savior”, does it have what its console counterparts have lived up to?

Gameplay
Just like most AC games, AC3L has the camera fixed in the 3rd person point of view. Yet, for the first time in the series, you will be playing as a woman. Even with a completely different protagonist, the game plays almost precisely like its console counterparts, with stealth assassinations, unique weaponry and the series’ famous parkour.

One difference made in the game from all the others is the ability to change your persona. The player can change into 3 different outfits at any dressing room within the game. The personas are Assassin, Slave and Lady. Each has their own unique abilities in how they can take down enemies, and sneak by some as well. The Assassin plays just like it has in all AC games; just this persona compared to the others has the most maneuverability and weaponry. The Slave persona can move just about as well as the Assassin, but also can get into areas that other personas cannot. The Slave also carries much less weaponry. The lady persona has the least amount of weaponry and cannot climb or run too fast, but she can charm a guy into doing what she wants. As much of a great idea the personas are at first glance, all I really wanted to do is play as the Assassin throughout the entirety of the game.

A unique feature added for the game being on the Vita is its ‘chain kills’ ability. Once you worked up the chain kills meter, you were able to press the button and the game would pause with little cursors on top of your enemies on how you want to kill them. Once you have picked how to kill each target your character will automatically kill your enemies with the options you chose. This feature may have made some parts all too easy, but it awesome seeing your character take down bad guys like a beast.

"WOAH!!! Did I just do that!?!"

Many other touch screen features were added to the game for both the front and back screen of the Vita. Once you got into a canoe, you could swipe the back touch screen to row your boat This was however a little difficult to get used to, but of course it was never forced, as you could use the button to row instead. Another back touch screen feature added was the ability to pickpocket by swiping your finger as well. This one was forced, and at times frustrated me because it did not work all too well. Other touch screen features were added like choosing your weapons and moving the map around, though, these were much preferable to use as it made it much quicker to navigate through.

One feature I absolutely dreaded was whenever you had a puzzle where you had to light up a map. This made you have to find a bright light source for your back camera to see. The reason I hated this feature is because it never seemed to work, and when it did finally work it seemed all too random. I would light up a few lamps in my house, point it towards my laptops screen and I would even go out and use the sun as my light source, but still it never worked properly. I spent 30 minutes on one of these puzzles till it finally worked randomly when I set it down. You have no idea how frustrated I was at this, I was just glad I was done with it... that was till the next puzzle came up.

One other gripe I had with the game was that there wasn’t as many side missions as there were in the previous AC games. The only missions I really ran across were ones where I would assassinate someone, manage my shipping of goods; which was a mini-game that wasn’t too fun; and just many collectibles. There was no craft your own bombs, or send your assassins out to kill. There was about as little content if not smaller than the first AC game. A little disappointing when you know this game’s title has a 3 in it, even though it is a spin-off.

When high up, looking down at New Orleans is a sight to behold when in game.

The settings in the game are quite unique, with the main city being in New Orleans you can also travel to the outskirts of the town to the Bayou, and travel by boat to Mexico. New Orleans is a rather small setting, but big enough to have plenty of traversal on buildings and such. The Bayou is a swamp like area where you can travel on trees and even swim in the swamp; just remember to watch out for those alligators. Mexico is more of a small fielded land, with many high walls and little buildings blocking you from climbing. The settings of the game can be fun at times, and if you get bored of one just go to another area where you will get another experience.

Singleplayer
You play as Aveline de Grandpre, a half African half French female assassin. Your father is a wealthy business owner and you help progress his business while being a part of the Assassins at the same time. Aveline has a mentor in the game who is the one who introduced and trained her in the field of assassination and stealth. You will not get too much story other than this though, a rather disappointing approach to a new storyline. Aveline is an exciting character that you think would have a very interesting background too. Sadly though, you hardly hear much of her story along with all the other characters.

Let me warn all who play the game, that the beginning of it is very slow and boring. It is almost dreadful to go through it, as you’re not told much nor are you even doing much. It’s an introduction showing you all the personas you can use in the game, but you will be saying, “I get it, give me some action now”.

"No! Noooo! Please don't make me play as her again!"

The missions in the game can be quite fun though, and just as good as most AC games before it. The biggest flaw though, is being forced to play the Lady persona. As I mentioned before, you really just want to play as the Assassin and skip the other personas completely. Sure, it may be fun to use your feminine wiles on a guard to get him to do something for you to complete your mission, but it gets old fast. I actually hated all missions I had to play the Lady. It’s like the game progressed much slower than you’re used to. If they made it optional for you to play the personas and use them in different ways in every mission, it would have been much more welcomed, but the way they introduced it just created a bore fest.

The game is also very short for an AC game. I would believe you could beat it in about 6 hours as a story mission at most would last 45 minutes, and that is if you’re wasting some time.

Multiplayer
When I first heard that AC3L was to have multiplayer I was very excited, and it made my anticipation for the game so much higher. Then, I actually played it, and was perhaps never more disappointed from a game’s MP before in my entire life.

Don’t get me wrong, the mp can be fun, but for the most part it is boring and you have to do almost nothing in it. It is a Risk type game where you choose either Abstergo or Assassins and you try to take over the world. You choose a home node and from there on you can attack enemy or your own nodes connected to your network to claim the city of that node. Now here is where the game makes it even worse, you cannot lose. Every battle you get in you win no matter what and then you gain points for that city till whichever side has more points when the time is up. Now this may be a good idea at first thought, but when playing it, you know the outcome, you know all that can happen and know with the time restraints where you’re going be at once time is up.

Now there is also a world timer that counts down to announce the winner of the world, either Abstergo or Assassins. Assassins pretty much always win because everyone chooses them for the popularity, so you already know the outcome of that too. The worst part about this as well is that once time is up on the world timer, all your hard work for your recruits and the levels they have progressed by get reset. Sure there is a leveling system for you overall that doesn’t get reset, but everything else besides owning new recruits does. The mp should be avoidable at all costs. Let me also tell you that I have seen better app games for free than this.

The multiplayer isn't even interesting to look at.

Technical
The game overall looks great, and is perhaps in line with AC2. The cinematics look pretty bad, but most AC games have always had bad cinematics. Everything looks like it’s suppose to in game though, and there is no doubting in the amount of work the devs went through to make the game look like it is.

Bugs, bugs and more bugs are littered within the game. The amount of glitches I had in the game is almost unbearable. I had errors popping up on my screen all the time as well. There was one point where I would get an error report at this one spot over and over again. I quit the game in frustration. I then came back the next day to experience the same thing happening to me for over an hour. I must have reported an uncountable amount of errors to Sony for this problem. Once I had finally made it past that point, my allies wouldn’t move, then I couldn’t progress without them, and that’s where I had to start over some more.

The voice acting in the game may not be the greatest either. Sure the accents of the characters sound great, but you hear quite a bit of mistakes made by the cast. The music on the other hand fits very well with the setting and the sequences when it is played. Very enjoyable especially when you're tired of hearing the dialogue.

There was a patch to the game, but nothing seemed to have been fixed. I only hope that there will be more patches as the game was almost broken for me.

Trophies
The trophies in the game are just as they were in the previous AC games. Get 100% sync on the missions, get all collectibles, kill this many people this way and of course they also added a rank up all the way in the mp. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if the mp wasn’t so boring. Though what I did was just watch tv or do something else when playing it, as it was easy to multitask while doing it. To get all mp trophies in the game it took me about 8 hours, so not too bad compared to all other rank up trophies. One other warning I will give you is be prepared for some glitched trophies, or some trophy descriptions to not be completely accurate.

Closing Thoughts
The game is fun, but falls short on many fronts. The overall single-player can be fun once you get into it, but it doesn’t have too attracting of a story and it is rather short. The mp is also very skipable, and is something you will probably not come back to ever, once you’re done with it. It may be the first AC game on the Vita, but I certainly hope they come back next time with a game much better than this. It may be a bit of a disappointment and not be the Vita’s savior, but it is still worth checking out at some point.

Gameplay: 8/10
Fun, and is just like its console counterparts, just with some things ruining the experience that are forced upon you.

Singleplayer: 7/10
Short and very lacking in story. Some missions are great while others are just not what you would want from an AC game.

Multiplayer: 5.5/10
It can be fun to strategize in it, but overall is completely skippable. Avoid at all costs.

Technical: 7/10
The game looks fantastic on the Vita. Though with all the bugs there are within the game you forget all about how great it looks.

Good review Loser. Sad to know it isn't what was expected (specially mp-wise), considering the potential it had. We'll have t wait and see if it doesn't flop sales-wise and they never give the VITA another try with this series.

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I just finished the story this evening. While the review is spot on (good job!) I have to add in that I would encourage getting it if you can find it on a bargain. I enjoyed that they used the whip both as a weapon and as a means to get around. It also has a full underwater sequence that is lacking from it's console brethren.

Oof, another AC portable disappoint? Glad to see it's at least gameplay-wise synchronic to the console games instead of the awful Bloodlines controls. I'll try it for kicks, maybe for a Christmas gift.

This game would get a 2 or 3 in technical from me. The game-breaking corrupted save glitch is embarassing, and the fact that Ubisoft Support is telling people who get it to either start over or look for fixes on IGN is unacceptable. Just my two cents.

Idk honestly I am impressed by ac3l in almost every way. Well until after beating the games single player and trying to load it back up to go collect the seemingly endless amount of collectibles. In which while loading it glitched which still to this point has no patch and it just keeps reloading sends you back to the opening menu over and over. So now at 74% trophy completion discourages me to the point that I am not sure if I will ever plat this title now. Thanks for a great game ruined by glitches ubisoft. Fml!

Now that I actually played this game... Ugh, why Ubisoft, why?! This game is pretty bad to begin with, but then they don't fix my save glitch?! I've had it with this pile of crap; hope I kept the receipt since I got it used... No more than a 5/10 for me.

This game looks like it's a dream to me. Weird lighting and soft lines. I can't quite put it in words, but it just looks weird to me. I quit it after about 30 minutes of play after Uncharted dropped for PS+. I got it with the Vita for a ROCKSTAR deal from Amazon, so that's why I have it. Very underwhelmed with the AC3 tie-in though.
I learned a little trick with the parchment puzzle on Uncharted I am going to try on the light puzzles here. I use my phone LED flashlight app and hold it to the Vita camera. A little shimmy and wiggle and it usually solved it pretty quick. Just passing that along for others.

I would've given this game a 3. Seriously. Everything about it screams low quality. Bogus side objectives that they don't even TELL you until after they've occured, the sound effects that come straight out of a game boy game, one fucking looping song in new orleans that gets so goddamn annoying after a while, a ridiculous amount of bugs that have you failing side missions for no reason, I can go on forever. Oh, and the story, which takes a diarrhetic shit all over my favorite franchise. Just finished, and I can comfortably tell you all that this is the worst game I've played in years, PS3 or no. I've played Black Ops on Vita, and while that game is pure shite as well, definitely pick up that bundle over the AC bundle that I got and save yourself from this horrendous game. It's like everything bad about the console games amalgamated into one shit-smelling chip. Despicable.

And guess what? I got the game breaking bug! So I have to start this awful game all over again if I want the platinum!!! Hooray! Well, see you all later, I'm off to burn down ubisoft! Not really but you get the point. Words simply cannot describe how much I hate this game